A software appliance is a software application that is combined with an operating system for the software application to run optimally directly on hardware or within a virtual machine virtualizing the hardware. A virtual appliance is a type of software appliance. A virtual appliance is a software application that is combined with an operating system for the software application to specifically run within a virtual machine virtualizing hardware, particularly within a logical partition (LPAR). Software appliances and virtual appliances eliminate the installation, configuration, and maintenance costs associated with running complex stacks of software, because they provide an image of all the software needed to run a given software application. As such, the software application does not have to be installed on the target hardware or the target virtual machine, but rather just has to be extracted and copied to the target hardware or the target virtual machine.